Futamono
"Futamono" is the sixth episode of Season 2, and overall the nineteenth produced hour of Hannibal. It originally aired on April 4, 2014. Plot A city councilman's body is found intertwined with a tree; Jack crashes Hannibal's dinner party to investigate Will's suspicions; a revelation shocks everyone. Synopsis Something has changed in Will Graham. The sickly and tortured loner imprisoned and put on trial for his life has hardened into something vengeful, a man who tries to manipulate others to do his bidding. He has become exactly what he is pursuing. But with his recent attempt on Hannibal Lecter’s life having been thwarted, he must figure out another way to prove to the doubters that the psychiatrist is really the murderous Chesapeake Ripper. Hannibal is composing a new piece of music on his harpsichord. Jack Crawford remains unconvinced about Hannibal’s guilt, but certainly not for lack of trying on the part of those around him. Will makes the effort again when an angry Jack comes to see him after the failed attempt on Hannibal’s life, and this time raises the specter of cannibalism. The Ripper kills in batches of three or four in quick order because otherwise the meat spoils, and “If the Ripper is killing you can bet Hannibal Lecter is planning a dinner party,” Will says. In fact, Hannibal might be doing just that. In musing to Alana Bloom about what he needs to get past his near-death experience at the hands of the hospital orderly Will sent after him, Hannibal mentions that he needs to get his appetite back. He pulls the business card of a Baltimore city councilman from his Rolodex and a recipe for steak and kidney pie from his recipe box. A body that will turn out to be the city councilman’s shows up in a vast parking lot, serving as the trunk of a tree with vines and branches entwined through the corpse. His chest cavity is split open and all his organs except his lungs are gone, replaced by poisonous flowers. Over brandy at Hannibal’s house, Jack tries to tell the psychiatrist about it but Hannibal won’t listen. "I have to pull back from this" he says, in doing a good impression of a traumatized victim. "I can’t think about death anymore. I’m going to celebrate life. First step: a dinner party!" Jack stares at him. Maybe Will’s theories are starting to break through… Later on, Dr. Chilton plays Jack a recording of a conversation between Will and Abel Gideon, during which Abel, knowing full well that Chilton has bugged his cell, describes in detail the night he was in Hannibal’s dining room and Hannibal suggested he kill Alana Bloom. Hannibal does fit the Ripper’s profile, Chilton says. Jack’s starting to think about it. At the BAU, Zeller and Price have identified the victim and are chainsawing the branches off him. The councilman died from drowning, and in the water in his lungs the team finds diatoms, a type of unicellular algae. Since no two water sources contain the exact same type of diatoms, that allows the team to narrow the source down to a fifty-mile radius in Virginia Meanwhile, Alana and Hannibal are distancing themselves from Will. Hannibal goes to the prison to say goodbye in person, doing his impression of a man with wounded feelings. As Hannibal's dinner party approaches, he starts preparing lavish dishes, starting by picking cards with addresses and recipes. After a sequence of scenes between cards, recipes, and cooking, Hannibal is shown appreciating the view of his murderous buffet. At the same time, several of his victims enter the forensics lab, making Jack think more and more about the idea that Hannibal might be the Ripper, after all. Jack questions Abel Gideon about the recording Chilton made of his conversation with Will. Gideon denies ever being in Hannibal’s home and accuses Chilton of making it all up. On the way back to his cell, Gideon is trash-talking the guards about the nurse he blinded and killed during a previous escape attempt, so the guards beat him and throw him off a staircase. He lands atop the metal cage over an orderly station. Hannibal’s dinner party arrives. Alana is there, looking fetching. Jack shows up but tells Hannibal he can’t stay but he’d love to take some food to go. Hannibal looks upset – nervous that Jack is going to test to see if it’s human meat, or just sad that he went to all this effort to prepare the food and his guest of honor isn’t going to eat it in front of him? Hannibal is not too upset to give Chilton a creepy wink from across the room. He’s right about one thing, though – Jack is going to test Hannibal’s food to see if it is made of humans. He drops it off at the lab and orders Zeller and Price to test it. After the party, Alana and Hannibal sit at the harpsichord and talk about Hannibal’s being a suspect and Will’s accusations. They kiss, continue kissing. Later, lying in bed, Hannibal watches her sleep. He snaps his fingers over her ear and she doesn’t stir. He gets up, wipes something off the rim of the wine glass on the nightstand next to Alana. Abel Gideon lies in his hospital bed. The curtains part, a doctor in a surgical mask enters and pulls down the mask. It’s Hannibal. The next morning, Abel Gideon has been replaced by the body of a hospital security guard suspended from the ceiling above Gideon’s bed with fishing line, hooks and fishing lures just like Will Graham used to make. The man has been eviscerated, his intestines and his badge left in a pile on the bed. The FBI knows Gideon couldn’t have done it – his back was broken and he couldn’t get out of bed. Back at Hannibal’s house, Alana wakes up to find Hannibal lying next to her. The guy doesn’t look tired at all, considering he had a busy night. When the doorbell rings, Hannibal wants to ignore it, but then the bell rings a second time. It’s Jack Crawford, here to ask Hannibal about his whereabouts the night before. When Hannibal says he was home all night, Jack asks if anyone can verify that. A voice behind him says, “I can.” It’s Alana, looking angry, wearing one of Hannibal’s dress shirts. “I was with Hannibal all night,” she tells Jack. Perhaps upset at being accused by his friend Jack, Hannibal prepares an elaborate roast, seasoning the meat, wrapping it in an enormous bay leaf and clay and setting it in his oven. He brings it to the table to serve his guest…Abel Gideon, clad in a bathrobe and hooked up to an IV. “Shall I carve?” Hannibal asks, knives poised over the roast. “I think you already have,” Gideon says as the camera pans down to reveal his missing leg. The BAU has identified the meat from Hannibal’s party as all being from animals. But the fishing lures used on the hospital guard are different. They are all made with pieces of humans…people killed while Will was in jail. Jack realizes Will must have been framed, and the Chesapeake Ripper is now claiming credit for his work. The team found something else in one of the lures – a piece of bark peeled recently from a tree. The bark comes from a rare tree, hardly found on the East Coast. However, there is a strand in Virginia, within the circle where earlier they determined the water in the city councilman’s lungs came from. Jack drives to the area and finds an abandoned building. As the sounds of Hannibal’s harpsichord float over the scene, Jack examines the building. He finds a cistern and pulls the cover off to find a young woman cowering before his flashlight. It’s Miriam Lass, his trainee who went missing while searching for the Ripper two years before. As Jack stares at her, the music crescendos. Hannibal has figured out the end of his new piece of music. He smiles to himself, very pleased with this symphony he is composing, oblivious to the symphony Jack just finished composing at the opening of the cistern. Extra Trivia= *The episode's title, (蓋物), is a soup course that is served in a "lidded" dish during a traditional Japanese multi-course dinner (Kaiseki (懐石)). |-| * The harpsichord piece bookending the episode at the beginning and end, ostensibly composed by Hannibal, is actually a piece by 17th-18thcentury composer Antoine Forqueray, entitled Harpsichord Suite No. 4, III. Sarabande: La D’Aubonne. The piece Hannibal works on at the start of Act 2 is an original piece by series composer Brian Reitzell and composer/musician Dave Palmer entitled Rondo in D Minor. Book to Show * Will’s description of Jack as “moving smoothly and slowly,” “carrying his concentration like a brimming cup” comes from a description in Red Dragon of Francis Dolarhyde coming downstairs in the middle of the night to review home movies of his potential victims. * Will’s reference to “a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named” comes from a description of Margot Verger meeting Clarice in the novel Hannibal. * Will quizzing Jack on “the first and principal thing” the Ripper does comes from dialogue in The Silence of the Lambs, when Hannibal similarly questions Clarice about Buffalo Bill. * Chilton coins the “Hannibal the Cannibal” nickname from the books, which first appeared in Red Dragon. * The romance between Hannibal and Dr. Bloom (who was a man in the books) is an invention of the show with no basis in the books. In the novel Red Dragon, Alan Bloom is said to have a wife. * Hannibal and Alana’s dialogue about funerals making us want sex (“It’s one in the eye for death”) comes from narration describing Will’s mindset following Freddie Lounds’s funeral in Red Dragon. * Hannibal‘s reference to a census taker comes from an iconic line in The Silence of the Lambs (“A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone,” changed to “a nice Chianti” in the film). * The samurai suit of armor seen as Hannibal exits his bedroom is the armor of his aunt Murasaki’s great great great grandfather Masamune, from the novel Hannibal Rising. Murasaki kept the armor in her attic in the house where Hannibal lived with her as a teenager, and she made offerings to it. Hannibal was drawn to it, and used Masamune’s sword to commit his first murder. * Gideon’s “damn slippery” soliloquy comes from Red Dragon, where it was spoken by Molly Foster Graham. * Miriam being kept at the bottom of a basement well echoes the way Buffalo Bill holds Catherine Martin prisoner in The Silence of the Lambs. (Although Miriam is a pastiche of Clarice Starling, she ends up in a similar position to the victim Clarice rescued.) Cut Scenes * The script contains more material at the start of the Hannibal/Jack scene, with Jack observing that Beverly would be alive if he hadn’t been at the hospital with Bella, and that Beverly’s death paid for Bella’s survival. * The scene between Chilton and Gideon was originally scripted and shot for “Mukōzuke,” and was meant to depict Gideon’s initial return to Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane (note that Chilton’s wardrobe matches the Chilton/Hannibal scene in that episode, and does not match the following scene in this episode, which is meant to take place moments later). The scene was adapted to its new context with the use of a new dubbed line referring to Jack and a cutaway to Will. * The script indicates that the writers originally planned for the Hannibal/Alana intercourse to be shown onscreen. According to Bryan Fuller, the director balked and said he did not know how to film the scene as Fuller intended it (an homage to the abstract sex scene in Fight Club) given the show's budget and network standards. It was subsequently realized two episodes later by director Vincenzo Natali in the episode "Su-zakana." * The writers originally planned to do the famed brain-eating “dinner scene” from the novel Hannibal, with Abel Gideon in place of Paul Krendler as Hannibal’s victim. Eddie Izzard asked them not to as he felt Gideon should remain in control of himself until the very end, rather than losing brain function. The show later visited the “dinner scene” in a very different context in “Dolce.” * Bryan Fuller originally planned for Miriam to return in “Savoureux,” in the final moments of the first season before the Will/Hannibal scene. The initial concept was for Jack to wake up and sense someone in his bedroom, discovering Miriam. Navigation